Assassination: A History of Political Murder by Lindsay Porter

Max Leonard gets stuck into Assassination: A History of Political Murder by
Lindsay Porter and finds that political murder has never gone out of style

By Max Leonard

6:30AM BST 06 Apr 2010

Like kissing babies on the election trail, assassination is a political tactic that does not go out of fashion, as Lindsay Porter’s intriguing book makes clear. It surveys political murder from antiquity to the present, and seeks to understand assassination as not only a political but also a cultural act.

Starting with the murder of Julius Caesar in 44BC, Porter focuses on eight assassinations (including those of Thomas Becket, Franz Ferdinand, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, and JFK) and, through them, themes ranging from Plutarchian justifiable tyrannicide and religious and political skulduggery to nationalism tainted with anarchism, lone gunmen and assassination as foreign policy.

Full of secret societies, conspiracies, idealism and madness, at times the book defies belief. Yes, the CIA really contemplated killing Castro with an exploding cigar; little wonder that assassination has given rise to so many unforgettable images and myths. In Porter’s telling, assassination is slippery and mutable: the deed always escapes the assassin’s attempts to define its meaning. Brutus, she points out, was relegated by Dante to the last circle of hell with Judas and Satan, yet was later rehabilitated, notably by Shakespeare. Becket was for centuries a beloved martyr before his shrine was destroyed by Henry VIII. The most telling story, however, is of Jean-Paul Marat’s assassin, Charlotte Corday, whose executioner was jailed for slapping the cheek of her newly guillotined head. In killing her, the court deplored Marat’s death; in sentencing the executioner, it was perversely recognising the purity of her act. There is a fine line between abhorrence and respect.

But does assassination as a political tactic work? Here, the book is equivocal. It opens with a quotation from Disraeli – “assassination has never changed the history of the world” – and finishes by concurring: the state is always larger than the individual who represents it. Yet even if the assassin fails in his or her aims, there is still the question of the wider reaction. The stated conclusion is belied by the triple tragedy (the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King jnr) inflicted on America in the Sixties, which the book implicitly links to the paranoid, clandestine adoption of assassination in its foreign policy in the Sixties and Seventies.

Porter has amassed a wealth of material, including paintings, etchings, sculptures and photos, coins commemorating Huguenot massacres, Marat’s bloodstained newspaper and other artefacts, and through them she weaves a compelling narrative.

The birth of anarchism and homemade bombs, she argues, ushered in assassination as a symbolic act – Franz Ferdinand was killed not for what he had done but what he represented. And from the anarchist’s “propaganda of the deed”, it is only a short jump to contemporary terrorism.